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Cisco's Dave Evans could have the best job in Silicon Valley, and maybe beyond.

He plays with the latest new gadgets and tech. He hobnobs with scientists. And then predicts the future.

His job title is "Futurist"—no, really. He's also chief technologist for Cisco's Internet Business Solutions unit.

IBS is the closest thing Cisco has to an internal R&D lab. It's a group that builds prototypes of futuristic tech for Cisco's customers. (It also does other things, like helping Cisco customers solve really hard technical problems).

How did he get such a great job? Longevity at Cisco—and being right about his tech predictions 100 percent of the time, he says. He's been at Cisco for 22 years, since he was 23. Back then, Cisco had fewer than 200 employees.

Evans says that all of his predictions have come true, mostly because to him they aren't predictions, but logical conclusions.

"I tend not to predict as much as I try to understand the trends," he says.

For instance, shortly before the first browser was released (Mosaic, in 1993), Evans declared that the the World Wide Web would be huge, that everyone would have a website and buy stuff online, with billions of devices connected. (He didn't predict social media or the Arab Spring—he doesn't claim to be psychic.)

He predicted self-driving cars 10 years ago, virtual characters/virtual people a decade ago, and intelligent artificial limbs decades before that.

Next up he sees virtual humans—intelligent Siri-like agents—coming to every living room. He says a new manufacturing technique called 3D printing will produce everything from homes to human organs. A house will be "printed" much like you print out an airline boarding pass today. Eventually, 3D printers will produce other 3D printers, which means self-replicating machines.

Exciting and scary at the same time.

He says quantum networks are coming in a few decades. That's a way of doing data networks based on quantum physics.

"So a molecule-sized quantum computer has the processing power of 5,000 planets the size of Earth covered in traditional silicon computing," he says. "You will be able to simulate the human brain, do realtime weather mapping, supply-chain what-ifs in real time. It's about where the personal computer is in the late 1960's."